The Met Office is to stop publishing seasonal forecasts, after it came in for criticism for failing to predict extreme weather.
It was berated for not foreseeing that the UK would suffer this cold winter or the last three wet summers in its seasonal forecasts.
The forecasts, four times a year, will be replaced by monthly predictions.
The Met Office said it decided to change its forecasting approach after carrying out customer research.
Explaining its decision, the Met Office released a statement which said: “By their nature, forecasts become less accurate the further out we look.
Tricky forecasts
“Although we can identify general patterns of weather, the science does not exist to allow an exact forecast beyond five days, or to absolutely promise a certain type of weather.
“As a result, ‘seasonal forecasts’ cannot be as precise as our short-term forecasts.”
It said the UK is one of the hardest places to provide forecasts for due to its “size and location”, making it “very hard to forecast much beyond a week”.
However, it said its short-term forecasts are “extremely accurate”.
The Met Office, based at Exeter in Devon, added that it would work towards developing the science of long range forecasting.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/8551416.stm
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I see this more as an insurance policy than one of admission of lack of skill. Though they are right, beyond about a week, entropy and chaos kicks in. About all anyonecan forecast seasonally with accuracy is:
Spring will be warmer than winter
Summer will be warmer than spring
Fall will be cooler than summer
Winter will be colder than fall
We’ll so how well they do with short-term monthly forecasts that are “extremely accurate”.
h/t to WUWT reader Robert of Ottawa
” no more “BBQ summers”
Great. What am I to do with my BBQ grill??
As a farmer, I am regularly astonished at how bad the much vaunted 5-day forcasts are – but I’ve never got round to analysing them.
For February, however, I printed off the 5-day forecast for Winchester every night (starting the project on 28th Jan) , and also the ‘observations’ data for that day. When i get round to it, i’m going to compile a little record of just how bad they were! And they were awful.
Oh, I forgot to include the most hilarious quote from Dr Vicky Pope at the Met Office:
“Much longer predictions are run, typically…predicting the next 100 to 1,000 years.”
And that was in 2007, before they got their new supercomputer.
So, 1000 year runs are ‘typical’, but anything more than a month ahead is just too tricky.
I’ll tell you what – I’ll do you a prediction for climate 1000 years hence. Exactly what value that would be to anyone, I don’t know. And if things didn’t seem to be going in the right direction over the next 30 years I can always run the argument that decadal changes are irrelevant: get back to me after a couple of centuries to see whether we’re on track and the model is holding up.
To be fair, there are some phenomena which are more easily forecasted on a large scale than a small scale.
Nevertheless, the Met Office has shown itself to have a “warm” bias and it is unfortunate for the Met that reality has to interfere with its wonderful understanding of climate.
Their 5 day forecasts are a joke. Unless the 5 day period is with a really stable zone centered on the UK their forecasts change daily. Here is one sequence I recorded a few weeks ago.
http://i301.photobucket.com/albums/nn77/aviate1138/Picture22-2.jpg
The Met office has failed to identify even general patterns. No one expects confidence from a prediction of rain on August 3rd made on April 13th. However, if you say “this will be a hot summer” and it is a cold one, then that just makes people angry. If you cannot even make sweeping, hand-waving predictions that are correct, don’t make any at all.
This is the correct decision. We may ridicule the overconfident imbecile who started the seasonal forcasts and management who allowed it to continue, but whoever gave the order to end it at least has their head partially in the game.
Which makes this all the more bizarre… and suspicious:
Climate change human link evidence ‘stronger’
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8550090.stm
Exactly how much faith can anyone have on their pontifications? Based on what data? What analysis? Is there an agenda that they’re not telling us about? How can this be so when all the evidence points to exactly the opposite conclusion?
But hasn’t Julia the Supermodeller just blown a squillion on a megawatt processor array of 200,000 PCs, to do just this thing, with her ‘robust’ code?
And this article on the Beeb website, too?
I tell you, the wheels are falling off, bigtime.
( PS; If I ask Julia, do you reckon she’d let me have one of those redundant PCs? )
I thought they even screwed up some short term forecasts this past winter when they missed some big snows. I’m not even certain their short term forecasts are very precise either. I thought the Met Office came under heavy criticism for that and was one of the reasons the BBC was looking to an Australian company to provide its forecasts. I must have misunderstood given that the BBC doesn’t dispute the claim that the Met Office 5 day forecasts are “extremely accurate”.
Let’s see…I’m going to look out the window, and it will be sunny. Bullseye! It is sunny out! I still have extremely accurate weather forecasts.
With all the tools they have and their new Super-computer, if they can’t forecast a season ahead then why should they keep it opened? The Farmer’s Almach does a better job at forecasting. They should give the money to the farmers instead.
Edit note, at the end of the post:
We’ll see how well they do with short-term monthly forecasts that are “extremely accurate”.
No more seasonal forecasts? Such a tragic loss of such a great source of humor. I shed one tear.
However, it said its short-term forecasts are “extremely accurate”.
They can look out the window, see it is raining, and predict with better than 50% accuracy that some form of rainfall will continue over the next hour. Now who can possibly want anything better than that?
Global warming is essentially the science of climate forecasting. So, I’ve always wondered why I seem to be the only person I’ve ever seen who has checked these forecasts and found them wanting (i.e. rubbish).
It doesn’t help that these removed all their forecasts from their website, but I suspect there may be a copy on http://www.climatemice.com/wiki/pmwiki.php?n=Profiles.MetOfficeForecasting
To be fair to the Met – there is a difference between predicting the weather and predicting the climate.
We don’t know what the temperature will be at 2:00 p.m. on Jan. 21st 2100 – but that is different than predicating what the average annual temperature may be in 2100.
I don’t think any of our climate models are accurate enough to do either type of prediction. But they are different types of prediction.
If I want to know what the weather is NOT going to be like in 3 days time I look at the Met Office forecast.
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icecover.uk.php
You can be absolutely sure there are thousands of warmists ON THEIR KNEES in the church of AGW, positively WILLING that dark blue line to go down.
Sickening hypocrisy.
Funny that this came out the same day.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8550090.stm
What ScottB said.
I have noticed that you can translate “1C” in tonight’s forecast to “OC or less” this winter. And this is in today’s forecast, for a small town called London.
I have a great admiration for your superior knowledge in matters of climate science and weather forecasting, but on this one I have to make a correction.
“Autumn is cooler than summer.
Winter is colder than “Autumn.”
At least in the UK, the jurisdiction of the Met Office.
“Forever Fall” and “Fall Leaves” just don’t portray the same feelings
Meanwhile, the Met states that the link between human activity and climate change is even stronger. This comes from an exhaustive study of 110 papers and fully supports the IPCC’s 2007 findings and is published in Wileys latest Climate Change Journal (has anyone seen this?). OK, now the science truly is settled. Phew!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8550090.stm
(My God, these guys don’t know when to stop)
Being “highly inaccurate” is of course never good. Being highly inaccurate always in the same direction leads to people giving you the squinty eye about your biases waving in the wind for everyone to see.
Peculiar – I wonder if Prof Slingo knew about this when she tried to convince the parliamentary inquiry that the climate models were accurate because the MET office runs the same code used to make climate predictions and to make weather forecasts?
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/uc387-i/uc38702.htm
(on errors in forecasts)
“Q210 Graham Stringer: You do not always get it right though, do you?
Professor Slingo: No, but that is not an error in the code; that is to do with the nature of the chaotic system that we are trying to forecast. Let us not confuse those. We test the code twice a day every day. We also share our code with the academic sector, so the model that we use for our climate prediction work and our weather forecasts, the unified model, is given out to academic institutions around the UK, and increasingly we licence it to several international met services: Australia, South Africa, South Korea and India. So these codes are being tested day in, day out, by a wide variety of users and I consider that to be an extremely important job that we do because that is how we find errors in our codes, and actually it is how we advance the science that goes into our codes as well. So of course, a code that is hundreds of thousands of lines long undoubtedly has a coding error in it somewhere, and we hope that through this process we will discover it. Most of the major testing is very robust.”
(always good to work in a ‘robust’)
Well, if the MET has vacated their space in the business of seasonal forecast, this is an exciting business opportunity. If Piers Corbyn is so good, let him fill the gap and claim the money (whatever it’s worth). This isn’t a swipe at him. The goal of a revolt is to replace the authorities. This is the opportunity.
Should have included this as well….
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/uc387-i/uc38702.htm
“Professor Slingo: Yes. Around the UEA issue, of course, we did put the code out at Christmas time, before Christmas, along with the data because I felt very strongly that we needed to have the code out there so that it could be checked. If you think about the sorts of codes that we use in climate modelling, we are literally talking of hundreds of thousands of lines of code – I know because I have written some of them – and of course, there will be errors in them. At least for the UK the codes that underpin our climate change projections are the same codes that we use to make our daily weather forecasts, so we test those codes twice a day for robustness.”
…emphasis added…
HAHA! A certain Anthony Watts just had his email about the waste of cash represented by the Met Offices big shiny supercomputer read out on the BBC’s PM radio show.